Creative Light

Is a fairly new company that recently released their take on softboxes, umbrellas, etc. One box of particular interest to me is the 3 foot Octa Softbox. I first ran across this in a photographer's video (yeah, yeah - I WOULDA provided the link if I COULDA found it again!), went to CR's web site and watched some of their product videos.

For the first time in my photographic career, I had a very strong, positive vibe telling me to not hesitate, buy the thing. So... I did. Came yesterday, and I've had a chance to do one test setting, and I must say I LIKE IT!!!!

Here's a simple shot of the box hooked up to my Elinchrom strobe...



The softbox has 2 layers of diffusion built in, so I did a quick experiment with my trusty model Tammie. I set up the box 3 feet away from Tammie on a 45, raised so the center of the box was just above her eye line. Aimed it just past her right shoulder, and tilted down to have the hotspot (if there is any) hit her right about eye level.



Notice the soft, wrap-around quality of the light, and the diffused shadow behind her camera left. her shadow is large enough to just appear to be a gradient on the background. VERY nice light

Pull the outer diffusion layer off, and gained 1/3 stop of light, with minimal change to the softness:



Still VERY nice look, yes? Ok, so now let's remove the inner diffusion panel and see what hard light looks like with this softbox:



NICE!!! Again, gained a 1/3 stop of light. With the diffuser gone, notice how the shadow has shrunk in size to the point that it's clearly a shadow. However, for hard light, it's not as harsh as I was expecting.

With the diffusers installed, light is soft enough you can get away with bad placement. Once I shot without them, I saw the light was too low, and further to camera right than I wanted. So, I adjusted that, and while I was at it, brought in a Lastolite tri-grip with soft silver reflector to lift the shadows on her face. Here's the setup:



And here's the results without diffusers in the softbox:



Beautiful light, even with the hard edges in the transition areas. And I very much like how the shadows are falling after raising the softbox and moving it to shorten the nose shadow.

So let's see what happens when I put the diffusers back in. Instead of stepping up one at a time, I put both back on and got this:



Quite a nice shot, yes? The shadows are soft and subtle, giving dimension to Tammie's face without being obvious. I think this just might be one of the best images I've created to date.

NOW to do it with an actual live-type-person of the animated variety..... (grin!)

Hope you enjoy....